Festival Predictions

2022 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo

Published on November 23, 2021

Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan broke out big at the Critic’s Week in Cannes with Vivarium and built the kind of post-screening hype that made it inevitable that his next project would be put into place rather quickly and draw a lot of interest. Insert Nocebo – a Ireland based production with portions shot in The Philippines that shot in February this year with the likes of Eva Green, Mark Strong and Filipino actress Chai Fonacier. The sophomore psychological thriller was written by Garret Shanley.

Gist: The film, which marks the first co-production between Ireland and the Philippines, follows a fashion designer (Green) suffering from a mysterious illness that puzzles her doctors and frustrates her husband (Strong) until help arrives in the form of a Filipino carer (Fonacier), who uses traditional folk healing to reveal a horrifying truth.

Production Co./Producers: Wild Swim Films’ Emily Leo, Lovely Productions’ Brunella Cocchiglia.

Prediction: MIDNIGHT.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. TBD (domestic). XYZ Films (international).

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).